[Music]
DJ SPOOKY: If you have Marshall DuChaump working with found objects and you have Andy Warhol
making copies of paintings, what does a sound artist do in our era in the 21st century?
[Music]
A lot of people ask me why my name is DJ Spooky and I kind of chuckle about the idea that
in the 90s versus 2000s, music back then and making digital media based music was still
a fresh take on what was happening.
So basically it's when you press play and there's nobody there.
Spooky, right.
It's something that's at the edge of like what's happening and through imagination in
the sense that it's uncertain.
Look, y'know, I took the name from a sort of German concept of geist which means spirit
or ghost so basically when you press play and there's nobody there, you have to imagine
that you're still hearing and seeing and experiencing all these things that are essentially at the
edge of possible.
DJing for me was kind of a hobby that spiraled out of control.
I was never really planning on doing just music.
It was mainly meant to be a component of my art.
For me, music isn't really music.
It's kinda like a reflection of a whole group of issues that relate to art—information
aesthetics—and the idea that design—when I say "design" I'm talking about graphics,
user interfaces, all these kinds of things that can go into creativity and the way creativity
reflects back.
Music is not separate.
It's combined with all of that.
I got into DJing mainly because my dad had collected records.
He passed away when I was two.
He was dean of Howard University's law school in the 60s, early 70s and his record collection
that was sort of just hanging out in one of the rooms in our home and I would listen to
stuff just chillin' when I read and I like having records playing when I was reading
and I realized I was listening to records a lot because, well I read a lot and after
a certain point I realized I had a lot of records and I kept going but it wasn't meant
to be like I was DJing.
It was just like somebody that was listening to a lot of different styles and it was kind
of like a little bug that had bitten me like a mosquito bite that was still itching.
It's amazing how some stuff can affect you when you're a kid and the way that it evolves
into other things later on.
I'd say listening to a lot of different styles of music as a kid has always kept my ears
open.
[Music]
Right now, sampling is the global vernacular.
I mean, so many kids—China, India, Russia, Japan, Brazil, y'know, Canada, you name it—everybody's
growing up with overload.
Which means that everybody is playing with fragments because you're not gonna watch the
whole thing.
You're not gonna read the whole thing.
The search engine motif has collided with the sample motif.
It's kind of a search byproduct.
So we've moved away from the album to a post-playlist kind of idea.
So if everybody is listening to bits and pieces of songs, nobody's really listening to a full
song through anymore.
They're kind of surfing.
They're going through social networks, they're going through collaborative responses.
They're like "if you'll like this song, you'll like that song."
I celebrate that.
So sampling was the first step toward that direction now we're moving further into that
frame.
My first art project that got a lot of attention from a multimedia point of view was called
Rebirth of a Nation.
I took the elements of DW Griffith's original of a film called Birth of a Nation from 1915
and remixed it and then presented it in a wide variety of contexts, but that wasn't
my first art project.
That, I felt, gave a good statement about nation state, identity, and some of the paradoxes
of ethnicity, race, class.
So that's where I decided that for part two of this kind of idea of looking at politics
and perception, definition of self, was Antactica and I was looking at this idea of climate
change called the anthropocene era which means that human impact on the planet has been so
extensive that we've moved out of previous geological era and now we are the people changing
and manipulating the planet.
Digital media art, music, and how people think of creativity.
For me, as an artist Antarctica was kind of like how do we think of this most remote place
on Earth with no government with no sense of geographic, specific, sense of governance
accept for science.
And it's the only place on Earth where there's literally no government, but science bases—there's
about 2,000 people on the entire continent.
So I was looking at and using this idea of culture and art in a vacuum.
All puns intended.
It's the only blank space on earth.
And I took a studio in a backpack and went to all the main ice fields.
I did these kinds of recordings of the ice field's sense of transformation, geologic
formation, weather patterns, stuff like that, and took the data and made music out of it.
It's a string quartet, it's a book and it's a museum show, but that's the point.
I can take the data and software and flip it in all these different contexts.
To me, it's the equivalent of saying water is water.
It's water.
It just depends on what container you put it in.
Hey, this is Paul Miller, AKA DJ Spooky, subscribe to THNKR!